Compress Images???

I have made a site layout through Photoshop with many slices, but my website is loading very slowly. What is the best way to compress images to make them load faster?

I have also changed them to gif from jpeg to speed it up a little.

You should check what images you want in better quality than some other images. The images you don't really need to be in excellent quality you can compress them as .GIF as these will load alot faster than .JPEG as you're doing now. Remember that .GIF pictures have a maximum limit of 256 colors.

the .GIF format can be used with or without dithering. This means that the color of a pixel in the new and compressed image will be determined by pixels laying aside from the pixel of which the color will be calculated.

Another thing you might want to consider is the image sizes you save the images in. For example if you want to show a image on your site in 120x100 pixels you don't have to save it as 1200x1000. This is a very out of proportion example but it's just to show you the point .

actually I find by using photoshop's "Save For Web" you can greatly compress images and still retain proper looks ... and it shows you what size the image is going to be after you have saved it ... many times jpeg actually comes out smaller than a gif file ...

If you can help it, try to combine as many of the images into single images as possible. The term "CSS sprites" will probably help you a lot.

When it comes to fetching pages from the server, you can think of an HTML page as a list of groceries to get from the store. You can either send multiple people in multiple cars to get single items from the store, or you can have a single person in a single car go to the store and get multiple items, then split the items up when the single person gets back, which is much more efficient.

Thank you for your responses. Right now all my images are all .gif and bad quality (I will change it after it loads faster).

But the site is loading amazingly slow, check it out...
http://adamwe.com




Is their anything else I can do?

And could someone further explain CSS sprites?

Wow, 339 images making up the layout. There's your problem right there.

There's no simple fix here, you're just going to have to read some books and tutorials about CSS and keep trying.

What is an acceptable number?

And, where do you see the amount of images?